Aisle7 is a wellness marketing company that helps some of the biggest food and vitamin retailers market health and wellness products more effectively. To lower its operating costs and speed new product development, Aisle7 replaced its VMware virtualization infrastructure with one based on Windows Server 2012 Datacenter and Hyper-V technology. The company gained access to a wealth of features that would have cost thousands of dollars extra from VMware and will allow it to delay a US$30,000 storage expense—a massive cash-flow benefit for the firm. Aisle7 used Microsoft System Center 2012 to create a self-service portal that developers use to provision their own server resources, which speeds new-product development. By using clustering and other Windows Server 2012 features, Aisle7 can more easily perform server maintenance and keep workloads running without interruption.

After the successful debut of �iPlus Cloud Edition' designed for small businesses and tax accounting firms, DUZON is now expanding its cloud service infrastructure with Microsoft’s solution. Released in early 2012, iPlus Cloud Edition is a cloud service designed to help small businesses and tax accounting firms reduce their IT burden in the face of regulation changes that include the recent enactment of the Personal Information Protection Law. iPlus Cloud Edition serves small businesses and tax accounting firms in handling tasks, enabling 1,000 customers to be won within a year, a remarkable achievement. DUZON was soon expanding its iPlus Cloud Edition infrastructure to keep up with increasing market demands. Expanding the existing infrastructure, though, would mean having to part with considerable expense.

Ddanzi Group, well-known for one of its services, The Ddanzi Ilbo, transferred all of its services to Windows Azure early in 2013 to secure IT competitiveness to a degree comparable to that of mainstream media outlets. The Group’s decision to adopt the cloud solution came from its ever increasing numbers of listeners and emerging security threats. In the first half of 2011, its podcast gained so much popularity that some dubbed it a social phenomenon. Such popularity, however, came at a price in terms of the risk from security threats such as DDoS attacks. The Group was unfortunately unable to handle either the increasing traffic loads or the threats. The result was a service interruption that lasted nearly one month. Having learned valuable lessons from the incident, the Group chose Windows Azure as a way to deal with both the traffic and security attacks effectively.

The Telenor Group is a Norwegian telecommunications company with worldwide operations serving almost 150 million mobile subscribers. To modernize its intranet and collaboration sites and deliver better search within and across business units, Telenor will soon migrate from the Microsoft SharePoint 2007 web application platform to SharePoint 2013. With 13 different business units spread across 12 countries, Telenor’s prime business objectives were to improve collaboration and best practice sharing, bolster process efficiency, and facilitate a more agile and responsive organization. Through SharePoint 2013’s enhanced capabilities, Telenor could also reduce significantly the complexity and maintenance cost of the 150+ custom features installed into its IT network.

Domino’s Pizza makes and delivers more than 1 million pizzas a day worldwide. Its store servers are critical to receiving orders, taking payments, scheduling staff, and every other aspect of store operation. The pizza giant plans to switch its 10,000 US store servers to the Hyper-V virtualization technology in Windows Server 2008 R2 to eliminate reliability and performance problems it experienced with its previous virtualization solution. Since moving its first 1,500 servers to Hyper-V, Domino’s has seen virtualization-related help-desk calls and performance glitches practically disappear, which removes barriers to taking orders and serving customers. By taking advantage of its Microsoft license, Domino’s has a cost-effective virtualization solution. Domino’s uses Microsoft System Center data center solutions to manage 15,000 servers with only two people, a huge efficiency achievement.

V8 Supercars is an international motorsport, media and entertainment company based in Australia. It employs 70 full-time staff with a network of approximately 1600 contractors and volunteers to manage race teams, events and broadcasts to more than 130 countries and online. V8 Supercars had outgrown its current IT infrastructure and wanted a cost-effective and flexible platform to support its expansion plans. With a highly mobile team setting up, delivering and broadcasting race events all over the world, it was critical to provide fast, efficient access to email and company files from virtually any location. V8 Supercars moved to Microsoft Office 365, giving everyone in the business stable, reliable access to their files, email and modern collaboration tools when they’re working in their Gold Coast headquarters, Sydney office or from various trackside locations in Australia and the world.

Ascribe, a leading provider of IT solutions for the healthcare industry, wanted to help clinicians identify trends and improve services by supplying faster access to information. However, exploding volumes of structured and unstructured data hindered insight. To solve the problem, Ascribe designed a hybrid-cloud solution with built-in business intelligence (BI) tools based on Microsoft SQL Server 2012 and Windows Azure. The solution also includes apps that run on Windows 8 tablets. By simplifying implementation with end-to-end Microsoft products, the company developed a proof of concept within six weeks. Now, clinicians can respond faster with self-service BI tools and gain actionable insight from a wide variety of data that includes clinical records, emergency room notes, and social media feeds.

Noroo Paint & Coating Co., Ltd., a paint maker with a 60-year history carried out a project for migrating the numerous business systems, which had accumulated for decades in the server room, to a private cloud. The best part of this project is that servers, storage and networks are integrated on one rack and 50 or so tasks are residing in individual environments (multi-tenants). This integration of the whole system was possible because Windows Server 2012 and System Center 2012. DIT Co., Ltd., an IT subsidiary of Noroo Paint & Coating Co., Ltd., who carried out this project, thought that the integration of different tasks in a virtual environment would require the virtualization of the operating systems, networks and storage layers and it would be possible to integrate different workloads into a single piece of equipment when multi-tenants were possible.

To maintain its competitive edge in the fast-moving financial services industry, Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce (CIBC) needs to ensure that its critical server infrastructure is always available. In tandem with supporting high availability, executives wanted to explore options for expanding the company’s server virtualization initiative to boost data center efficiency. CIBC chose to participate in the Windows Server 2012 Rapid Deployment Program to evaluate the release candidate version of the operating system. Specifically, the company opted to test the new failover clustering capabilities in the solution, including Cluster-Aware Updating. By using these and other features as part of a broader adoption of Windows Server 2012, CIBC hoped to improve the performance and availability of critical database workloads—while lowering the cost to pursue these priorities.

Sberbank of Russia, Baikalsky Head Office, had already virtualized its data centers using the Hyper-V technology in the Windows Server 2008 R2 operating system, but it was eager to further reduce costs and manual work. It is upgrading to the Windows Server 2012 operating system to take advantage of enhancements in availability, networking, and management. By using Hyper-V Replica, Sberbank will save US$100,000 on deploying a third-party replication solution. It expects to reduce IT management work by 20 percent by using the improved automation features in the operating system. And it can fail over workloads between data centers in minutes versus hours with Hyper-V Replica. All these efficiencies will help the IT staff minimize the time spent keeping infrastructure running and maximize both application uptime and time spent helping the business innovate.